Will Lee joined ADWEEK as CEO in July 2023 after serving as chief operating officer at National Public Radio and, before that, senior vice president and head of digital, entertainment group at Meredith.
While he hasn’t been yelled at for quite some time, it certainly happened in the early stages of his career, he told ADWEEK for the final installment in video series Resume Rewind, sponsored by entertainment wiki hosting service Fandom.
Lee grew up in a family of physicians, telling a newspaper reporter when he was seven that he wanted to be a cardiovascular surgeon when he grew up, as cardiovascular was “the most syllables I could say when I was seven.”
He also dreamed up a business plan for a company that would make a Walkman the size of an actual cassette tape cover.
Lee followed a different path after graduating from Brown University, applying for 33 advertising jobs and getting just two interviews and no offers, before a friend alerted him to an editorial assistant position at Entertainment Weekly.
“I figured I would just be making copies and coffee for people,” he said, adding that EW was one of the publications where you could actually get bylines at the time, and recalling when legendary publicist Pat Kingsley hung up on him.
He thought he bombed an interview with Harvey Levin for TMZ after not being quick enough when asked to share his opinion on Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson. But he got a call three days later, and ended up serving as New York bureau chief and producer from 2006 through 2009, telling ADWEEK, “TMZ is such a bizarre place.”
“The thing with celebrity publishing and entertainment publishing is that the stakes get ratcheted up far beyond their actual magnitude,” Lee said. “You just get yelled at by people constantly, particularly by publicists, lawyers, managers, all of it.”
